SECT.  LXI.  New sensible Notices of the Deity in Man, drawn from the Knowledge he has of Unity.

I still find other traces or notices of the Deity within me: here is a very sensible one.  I am acquainted with prodigious numbers with the relations that are between them.  Now how come I by that knowledge?  It is so very distinct that I cannot seriously doubt of it; and so, immediately, without the least hesitation, I rectify any man that does not follow it in computation.  If a man says seventeen and three make twenty-two, I presently tell him seventeen and three make but twenty; and he is immediately convinced by his own light, and acquiesces in my correction.  The same Master who speaks within me to correct him speaks at the same time within him to bid him acquiesce.  These are not two masters that have agreed to make us agree.  It is something indivisible, eternal, immutable, that speaks at the same time with an invincible persuasion in us both.  Once more, how come I by so just a notion of numbers?  All numbers are but repeated units.  Every number is but a compound, or a repetition of units.  The number of two, for instance, is but two units; the number of four is reducible to one repeated four times.  Therefore we cannot conceive any number without conceiving unity, which is the essential foundation of any possible number; nor can we conceive any repetition of units without conceiving unity itself, which is its basis.

But which way can I know any real unit?  I never saw, nor so much as imagined any by the report of my senses.  Let me take, for instance, the most subtle atom; it must have a figure, length, breadth, and depth, a top and a bottom, a left and a right side; and again the top is not the bottom, nor one side the other.  Therefore this atom is not truly one, for it consists of parts.  Now a compound is a real number, and a multitude of beings.  It is not a real unit, but a collection of beings, one of which is not the other.  I therefore never learnt by my eyes, my ears, my hands, nor even by my imagination, that there is in nature any real unity; on the contrary, neither my senses nor my imagination ever presented to me anything but what is a compound, a real number or a multitude.  All unity continually escapes me; it flies me as it were by a kind of enchantment.  Since I look for it in so many divisions of an atom, I certainly have a distinct idea of it; and it is only by its simple and clear idea that I arrive, by the repetition of it, at the knowledge of so many other numbers.  But since it escapes me in all the divisions of the bodies of nature, it clearly follows that I never came by the knowledge of it, through the canal of my senses and imagination.  Here therefore is an idea which is in me independently from the senses, imagination, and impressions of bodies.

Moreover, although I would not frankly acknowledge that I have a clear idea of unity, which is the foundation of all numbers, because they are but repetitions or collections of units: I must at least be forced to own that I know a great many numbers with their proprieties and relations.  I know, for instance, how much make 900,000,000 joined with 800,000,000 of another sum.  I make no mistake in it; and I should, with certainty, immediately rectify any man that should.  Nevertheless, neither my senses nor my imagination were ever able to represent to me distinctly all those millions put together.  Nor would the image they should represent to me be more like seventeen hundred millions than a far inferior number.  Therefore, how came I by so distinct an idea of numbers, which I never could either feel or imagine?  These ideas, independent upon bodies, can neither be corporeal nor admitted in a corporeal subject.  They discover to me the nature of my soul, which admits what is incorporeal and receives it within itself in an incorporeal manner.  Now, how came I by so incorporeal an idea of bodies themselves?  I cannot by my own nature carry it within me, since what in me knows bodies is incorporeal; and since it knows them, without receiving that knowledge through the canal of corporeal organs, such as the senses and imagination.  What thinks in me must be, as it were, a nothing of corporeal nature.  How was I able to know beings that have by nature no relation with my thinking being?  Certainly a being superior to those two natures, so very different, and which comprehends them both in its infinity, must have joined them in my soul, and given me an idea of a nature entirely different from that which thinks in me.